Tag Archives: oil pastel

I met the other elementary art teacher from our district at the San Diego Museum of Art. Four of her students had this cupcake lesson chosen for the Young Art 2017: Beyond the Ordinary Exhibition. She mounted them on colored paper squares and grouped them together.

I think her students were grade three, I did this with my First Graders.

I thought it was a great way to use up some of the magazine donations and scrap paper we have accumulated.

I had my students color the background with oil pastel. I don’t typically use colored paper because it is difficult to estimate how much I need from year to year.

My Grade Two classes did these. They have a play that they do every year called “Going Buggy” This seemed like a good lesson to add to the bug lessons we have done in the past-bugs like plants after all.

I take out all the black pans from our watercolors to keep kids from painting every thing black because I do that, I try to find fun projects to do to use up the black paint.

Students were instructed to create either warm or cool colored flowers and then the centers were to be the opposite.

I created this after having a large quantity of leftover black watercolor paint. I pop the brown and black pans out of the paint palettes for two reasons. One, it forces my students to mix colors and two my youngest artists do not paint everything black and brown.

Students learned about the art of filigree. They looked at examples both ancient and modern. They then traced (or could draw their own) a large heart onto 9×12 paper.

Using white oil pastel, they filled their hearts with organic, curved lines. They painted the inside with water color of their choice then black watercolor around the hearts.

Fifth graders study clouds and I thought it would be fun for them to paint them. As the students walked in, the teacher asked what we were doing, I said clouds and Black Mountain. He said we just learned yesterday about Lenticular clouds. The timing was so perfect.

We have a local mountain that can be seen from many of the upstairs windows and the school parking lot.

It is called Black Mountain.It is 1,500 feet.

The top is covered with various radio and other antennae. It is covered in scrub brush and has dusty trails and loads of rocks but people love it for local hiking and mountain biking.

I thought we could put the two together: the mountain in our backyard and the study of clouds. We talked about all kinds of clouds and looked at pictures of clouds. We talked about clouds in art and looked at work by Beirstadt and O’Keeffe among others

As always, I did the demo, told them my thoughts about it and let them have a latitude of choices. I suggested Black Mountain but the kids could choose any landscape they desired.

Some kids chose Whistler or Half Dome- yes, this artist made sure I knew that Half Dome is NOT a mountain. I even had some choose to create beaches.